Jason Rhodes

Jason Rhodes (1930-) was a colonel in the US Marine Corps who served in the Korean War and Vietnam War. In 1983, Rhodes led a covert operation to recover prisoners-of-war still held in Vietnam following the end of the war, hoping to rescue his own lost son. Rhodes put together a team of Vietnam veterans for the mission, and they managed to rescue some survivors, although he lost a few members of his squad, and his son was not among the surviving soldiers.

Biography
Jason Rhodes was born in 1930 in the United States to a military family, losing most of the men in his family at the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War. Rhodes served in the US Marine Corps during the Korean War, and he rose to the rank of Colonel during the Vietnam War. His son Frank Rhodes went missing-in-action in 1972 during a prisoner rescue, and Rhodes frequently petitioned the government for its aid in locating his son, also pouring thousands of dollars into his own rescue efforts. In 1983, he finally came up with the idea of putting together a rescue team of Frank Rhodes' old squadmates, some five men, as well as Force Recon Marine Kevin Scott, to return to Vietnam and rescue Frank and other MIA soldiers. Rich oil man McGregor decided to fund the operation, as his own son was missing in action. The group trained near Galveston, Texas, with McGregor paying for a life-size reconstruction of the Vietnamese prison camp to be built in Galveston. The soldiers ate only Vietnamese food so that their scents and appetites would not differ from other Vietnamese people, and they practiced stealth, strength training, endurance, and, finally, an assault on the fake camp.

After their raid met McGregor's approval, Rhodes and his men were given guns and sent off to Bangkok, Thailand to meet up with opium smuggler Jiang, who was to smuggle them into Laos to the Vietnamese camp. The Central Intelligence Agency discovered the plot and confiscated the group's weapons, hoping to prevent the rescue and therefore prevent an international crisis. However, they purchased outdated World War II weapons from Jiang and were smuggled across the border, and they killed some Laotian border patrol troops at the border when they mistook the group for drug smugglers. The group proceeded to make their way to the camp on foot, and they assaulted the camp after they saw the prisoners and Vietnamese troops returning to the camp. In the ensuing fight, Jiang and two of Rhodes' squad were killed, but Rhodes managed to free several POWs. When the squad's remaining members and the POWs escaped on helicopters, Rhodes learned that his son had died from tuberculosis years before, but he was happy when he saw the MIAs reunite with their families at the airport on the squad's return home.